


Gotta Be Strong in the Face of Suffering

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, The Rivian Pogrom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 05:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19144372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: In which Geralt is dead, and Eskel learns to grieve.





	Gotta Be Strong in the Face of Suffering

**Author's Note:**

> This story isn't necessarily a prequel to [Quid Pro Quo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18566200), but it can definitely be read as one; that Eskel and this one are pretty much the same guy, whether or not those events later transpire.
> 
> For anyone not familiar with the (Witcher novels) canon this is based on: this is actually how Geralt's story ends in the final book, with him dead at the hands of an angry mob. The video games are based on the premise that he returns to life and has a further series of wild adventures (and has amnesia for the first two games, such that he has to be, for instance, told Eskel's name when they meet again.) 
> 
> Title is from "In League with Dragons" by The Mountain Goats: 
> 
>  
> 
> _Be so hard to look away  
>  Gotta be strong in the face of suffering  
> Cut a good figure just in case somebody's watching  
> Even if it ends up meaning nothing  
> Let the breezes spread such scandal as they may  
> Maybe Boris Vallejo paints the back of your head someday_
> 
>    
> Many thanks to WritingCyan, Ylixa, Quarra, and xantissa for feedback and encouragement!

It was Vesemir who told him that Geralt was dead. He said it first with his eyes, his shoulders, his expression--his grim solemnity was nothing out of the ordinary way, but there was visible concern under it. He was going to tell Eskel something, and he was worried about how Eskel would react, and he was letting Eskel see that he was worried. 

It might have been a dozen other things, but Eskel knew at once.

"Geralt," Vesemir said, when Eskel reached him. They were standing in the middle of the square, outside the inn in Vizima. 

Eskel nodded, warding off more words, though Vesemir had said his name with the weight of a complete sentence. When the silence stretched too long and it seemed like Vesemir would just let it go on indefinitely, Eskel said, "When? Where?"

"A couple of weeks ago. In Rivia, ironically," Vesemir said, his words dry and steady as the cobblestones underfoot. Eskel stared at them as Vesemir went on, resolutely not working out where he'd been and what he'd been doing two weeks ago. "There was a pogrom against the nonhumans there. He stepped in and was mortally wounded. Yennefer tried to save him, and died herself."

Of course she had; Eskel had heard the details of the curse that bound them from Geralt once, years ago. It was a good thing Geralt would never know that his attempt to save Yen's life had ultimately killed her. 

"Bodies?" Eskel gritted out.

Vesemir shook his head. "All this was in the midst of the pogrom--Triss Merigold found me to inform me, and she had had to piece the story together from half a dozen sources, but at least she made sure none of them were lying. By the time she started asking, Geralt and Yennefer had vanished, leaving only a pool of blood behind. Ciri, also, was nowhere to be found, and hasn't been seen since."

Eskel swallowed hard, wanting to curse, and unable to get out a word. There wasn't a word for it. Geralt had finally found Ciri, settled all that battling over where she should go and what she should do, and then died in front of her at the hands of some rabble. And now she was gone again, and who could ever bring her home? Geralt would hate that part more than anything, maybe even more than what he'd done to Yen. 

Without him, there wasn't even any home for Ciri to return to, not really. Ciri had always cared more for belonging with Geralt than whether there was a roof over their heads at night, nevermind what roof it was.

Eskel just shook his head a little, staring down at the cobblestones, no words coming to him to express any of it. Vesemir obviously understood well enough, because he said, "Come on. We'll drink."

* * *

Drinking didn't help, but it gave him something to do while the idea of Geralt being dead sunk in. Vesemir left the next morning, and Eskel spent another day and night drinking, alone in a room in the inn. He was waiting for something to happen, waiting to be _drunk enough_ , but no matter how many bottles he emptied, nothing changed. He was just drunk on the floor of an unfamiliar room he had never shared with Geralt and never would.

When the second morning dawned, Geralt was still dead, and Eskel was still there. He gave up on waiting for anything to happen, sobered himself up, and went to look for contracts. 

Killing things didn't help either, but it was something to do.

* * *

As the days and weeks went on, he became more and more aware that he was still waiting for something. Something was unfinished, something that had begun when he found out Geralt was dead. When he realized he'd been working his way south and east, he gave up on doing anything else and headed for Rivia directly. 

He barely had to ask questions to discover the tavern where the pogrom had been centered; he hadn't even made it up to the door of the place when he heard someone proudly saying, "And this, right here, this is where the witcher and the witch died, you can still see their blood on the stones."

Eskel changed direction and walked over to the small knot of people--humans, all of them. That made sense, because any of the other races would have known better than to demote Yen to a witch, and also because it was the humans in this town who had murdered Geralt. Eskel kept his eyes wide, his pupils narrowed to obvious slits, just in case the two swords on his back didn't tip them off right away.

He was still a few yards away when the local enthusiast spotted him and gasped, "Another one! A witcher!" 

The humans scrambled out of his way, and then there was nothing between Eskel and the bloodstained paving stones. 

After all this time there was no knowing whose blood it was, or whether the stain was really blood at all. He thought for a moment of Kaer Morhen, and the aftermath of another pogrom, when blood sunk deep into stone, uncleaned for months after it was spilled.

Eskel had heard rumors of it; it was early fall by the time word reached him and he'd headed for home as swiftly as he could. He'd had no idea of who had been in the castle when it happened, or how many had really been killed. He reached the foot of the witchers' trail with darkness already falling and camped there rather than trying to climb it in the night; whatever had happened had happened back in the spring, and he couldn't do anything to change it now.

He couldn't doubt anymore that _something_ had happened to spark those gruesome rumors; he'd already seen evidence of a huge crowd trampling over this ground, some time ago.

Sitting there at dusk, he was looking back down the trail he'd traveled that day, and saw a thin line of smoke. Someone else making camp, below the last mountain pass on the road, a handful of hours behind him but heading the same way. Eskel had stayed in his camp, waiting, until the middle of the next day, and when the lone traveler was three miles away he'd caught the sound of a familiar voice coaxing his horse up another incline. 

It was the first time Eskel could ever remember his knees going weak without some suitable wound to justify it: the moment when he knew for certain that Geralt hadn't been at Kaer Morhen when it happened, and that Geralt would be at his side when he saw whatever they were riding toward. Eskel had fallen to his knees there at the campsite, and his own horse had come over to nudge worriedly at him. He'd been back on his feet before Geralt was within a mile.

He was on his knees now, looking down at the stained paving stones. He could wait here forever, but Geralt would never come up the road to find him.

Eskel felt something giving way in him--it wasn't only his knees that had gone weak--and he realized what he'd been waiting for ever since Vesemir found him. But he couldn't let it out here, under the eyes of people who might well have been among the mob of Geralt's killers. Not here, under the open sky, alone among all these indifferent humans.

He held out his hands and watched them as if they belonged to someone else, shaping an Aard that scoured the surface of the stones until they were as pale as old, clean bones. He was aware of a growing silence, a few voices sharply rising and just as sharply hushed. They kept their distance, though he could feel them watching.

It was a little disappointing that no one tried to rush him from behind. The same Aard that scoured stone would have done the same for bones, even with living flesh in the way. Maybe that, at last, would have helped.

But no one came near him, nor shouted any abuse at him; he could feel them, resentful and terrified in various combinations, but none was quite mad enough to try him. And if they wouldn't give him that, then there was nothing here for him at all. Before the rock dust settled, Eskel got to his feet and walked out of Rivia without looking back.

* * *

Eskel was waiting for it every night after that, when he made himself a secure little camp or locked himself inside a rented room. Now that he knew what it was, the grief locked inside him felt heavier every day, pressing against his heart and lungs like a boulder on his chest. 

But it didn't come, and didn't come, and he didn't know how to set it free. He tried drinking again, to no avail. He lay alone in his bedroll, staring up at the sky, and dredged up every one of his most closely-held memories of Geralt, from childhood pranks to adolescent sexual experiments to cleaning the ashes of a massive pyre from Kaer Morhen's courtyard. 

It seemed to work in reverse, somehow. Instead of drawing something out of him, every memory seemed to get locked away inside that weight, turning faint and distant and cold. 

He needed something more, something that would shake this feeling loose the way the sight of those stones almost had. Something--someone--who he could trust with this, however little he liked the idea. Someone who would be anything but indifferent, and mad enough not to keep his distance from Eskel.

Finding out where Dandelion was plying his trade these days was nearly as easy as finding the place where Geralt had died. Eskel turned his steps toward Oxenfurt and tried not to think of what he would find there.

* * *

The moment when Dandelion caught sight of Eskel walking toward him across a shady square was oddly like the moment Eskel had caught sight of Vesemir waiting to break the news to him. Dandelion's demeanor couldn't have been less like Vesemir's habitual reserve, but the half-hidden concern was the same; Dandelion knew why Eskel had come looking for him, and it worried him. He knew something of what it meant for Eskel to have lost Geralt.

Eskel stopped when he was still several yards away, not at all certain he wanted to actually speak to Dandelion about this in public. Dandelion wouldn't have Vesemir's restraint, and Eskel was no more prepared to do this in front of half the bards and poets in Oxenfurt than in front of a crowd of gawping locals in Rivia. 

But Dandelion hurriedly dismissed himself from the group he'd been speaking with and rushed over to Eskel. His hands fluttered between them for a moment before settling tentatively on the tops of Eskel's shoulders, above the pointed studs that covered the upper arms of his jacket. "Eskel. I'm so sorry."

Just that, and Eskel had to look away, turning the scarred side of his face toward Dandelion. It revealed less.

"Come," Dandelion said, his voice mercifully brisk. "I have rooms here, it's not far. We can talk there. I'll tell you everything I can."

The way he said it confirmed something Eskel had half-remembered Vesemir alluding to. "You were there. With him."

"I was," Dandelion said, and nothing more. He gestured toward the east side of the square and set off, and Eskel moved to his left side and matched his stride through the winding streets. 

He watched the ground underfoot and tried not to think of anything. He'd found Dandelion; he hadn't really planned beyond that. He'd have to look for contracts, after this. After... after. He would need work. That shouldn't be a problem; there seemed to be always more work than witchers lately.

Think about the contracts, only the contracts. Maybe he'd go out to Novigrad, maybe all the way to Skellige. There was always work on the islands. He just had to do this first, just--

"Here we are," Dandelion said, pushing open a heavy wooden door in a stone wall. He led Eskel up two flights of stairs to a considerably less imposing wooden door, and then into a startlingly pleasant room, sunlit and furnished with a table and chairs and one entire wall covered in shelves of books. There were two lutes on the table and a scattering of pages covered in scribbling. 

Eskel didn't let himself read the words.

"Sit, sit," Dandelion said, gesturing toward the settle tucked into a corner. It had cushions in bright reds and purples, ridiculous and gaudy. Eskel wondered for a moment if he would dirty them beyond repair by sitting down still covered in dust from the road, and then he gave up and sat. 

Dandelion returned through an archway from a neighboring room sat down at the other side of the settle, leaving just enough room between them for all the bottles he had gathered into his arms. He hadn't brought any glasses, but that hardly seemed necessary.

Eskel dared a glance up at Dandelion's eyes, which were still horribly full of sympathy or something like it, too warm to be pity. He knew what this meant to Eskel. He _knew_.

"What'd Geralt tell you about me?" Eskel asked, dropping his gaze to the bottles and selecting the clearest liquor to drink first. Not, _what did Geralt tell you about us._ Geralt wouldn't have spoken of it that way.

"He didn't, mostly," Dandelion said. "But what little he said spoke volumes, especially alongside all the things he never said. I think he wished to keep you from me, a little. You, or what was between you..." Eskel gritted his teeth and didn't let himself look up, just waited until Dandelion went on. "Well, I'm fairly certain it wasn't something he wanted me turning into ballads."

Eskel tried, for a moment, to be bitter--to imagine that that had been Geralt taking something from him, monopolizing all the fame Dandelion's ballads brought him. But Eskel knew he would have hated whatever ballads turned _him_ into, let alone what they would have made of what was between him and Geralt, forcing it into words instead of something that had played out over a lifetime of more silence than speech. There was no way they could get it anything but wrong, forcing it into lines like that.

Geralt had never liked being famous. Of course he had shielded Eskel from that fate.

Eskel took a swig from the bottle, and said, "That what this is going to cost me? You going to make a ballad about this?"

Dandelion said nothing for long enough that Eskel stole another look at him, and found him smiling wryly. "I've tried, to be honest. Nothing I've ever performed--nothing I even attached to Geralt's name, even in scribbling it--but I think what you are, what you and he were, doesn't fit into a ballad, not without ripping out the heart and soul of it. And knowing that Geralt would have forbidden me writing such a thing if he hadn't known that that would only encourage me... no. I've no plans to make you famous."

Eskel listened to Dandelion's heart beating as he spoke, but the words and the rhythm all fit together; he couldn't find any trace of a lie. And no matter what it would cost him, Eskel had to listen to everything Dandelion could give him today. If it was a lie, it was. It didn't matter now.

"This is by way of paying a debt, I suppose," Dandelion went on pensively. "All Geralt's done for me through the years--the least I owe him is to make sure the people who mattered most to him know what happened. Do you... do you want to ask, or shall I...?"

Eskel took another drink, and rubbed his hand over his eyes. He'd tried to assemble a series of questions he needed answered, as if he were going through the process of tracking down a monster or unraveling the history of a curse. He could scarcely remember now what he'd needed to know beyond what Dandelion had already told him: that Geralt had cared enough to keep mostly silent about him. About them, whatever they were.

Still. There was one very obvious question. "Whoever actually killed him..."

"Dead. Extremely thoroughly dead. I don't know if it was Yennefer or Ciri, but that was how I realized he'd gone down--I saw a fireball and rushed over, and by then Geralt and Yen were both on the ground. But there was also a good-sized pile of ash and bones on the ground in front of them. I'd say whoever did it, and everyone within arm's reach of the culprit for good measure."

Eskel nodded. He'd figured that had been taken care of, between Ciri and Yen, but it was good to be certain. 

"Did he," Eskel said, and then shook his head a little. "It must have been... something fast, if he couldn't..."

"Pitchfork, I heard," Dandelion said grimly. "One of those unlucky stabs in the belly that spurts blood like you've pierced the heart. By the time I got there he wasn't moving, wasn't breathing that I could see, but there was... there was a lot of blood. Even Yen... it was very fast, yes."

"Ciri?"

"She did something, I think. I remember hearing her scream, and I know I went to where they were, I know I _saw_. I was standing right there, and I may be a coward but I wouldn't have left her--hell, next to Ciri would have been the safest place to be. But the next thing I remember is being in the middle of the crowd on the other side of the road, and by the time I managed to get back to where they'd been, they were gone, all three of them. All that was left was the ashes--and the blood."

Eskel swallowed hard. "But she--Ciri was with them, and then--they were all gone at once. So no one could have taken them. The bodies. Ciri took them somewhere, covered her trail so no one could follow."

" _Yes_ ," Dandelion said firmly. "If anyone had dared to--to desecrate them--it wouldn't have been something we missed. There wasn't _time_ , and Ciri was there with them, I know I saw that much. She must have taken them away somewhere to--to be sure they were..." 

Dandelion seemed to run out of words there, and picked up another of the bottles, opened it, and took a healthy swig of his own. 

Eskel did the same, and sat back against the corner of the settle, the luridly purple pillow tucked behind his hip. He wasn't feeling the drink yet, but he didn't think it would be too much longer. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten or slept, and he hadn't even been meditating as much as he should. He was excellently prepared to get extremely drunk, extremely fast, which was good, because he was pretty sure he would need to be.

"What," Eskel said, and then his voice failed him. He steeled himself for the pain, and then threw himself at his target. This was what he had come to ask, more than anything else. This was what he really needed. 

"What have you written about it? About them dying in each other's arms, tragic fated lovers, and their daughter--"

Eskel's voice failed him. He drank until he had to breathe, and then looked over at Dandelion, who was looking a little stricken. 

"Do you... really want me to answer that?" Dandelion asked cautiously. "Is that... I can't imagine you want to hear it, when..."

Eskel let out a breath that might have been a laugh in another life, and said, "I don't want to. But I need to. I--I know he's gone. I know he's dead and he's not coming back, and it was her who went down to the dark with him." _Her, and not me._ "It's what happens to us witchers; we fall somewhere and there's never even a body to burn most of the time. You find out a witcher's died weeks later, months later, or you count up the years since anyone's seen him and figure he must be dead. I know. I'm not even surprised. But I..."

Eskel pressed the heel of his hand to his chest, just below his wolf medallion, and struggled for the words to say what he couldn't say, to describe the thing he couldn't touch and couldn't see.

"Ah," Dandelion said softly. "Yes, I see. Geralt was much the same; I thought sometimes that I felt things for both of us. And he had enough courage and strength and destiny for two men, so perhaps it balanced out."

"Ten," Eskel murmured.

Dandelion nodded acceptance of the amendment. "Shall I--it's a whole cycle of ballads, and parts of it are still rough, but--"

"Not like I know shit from good chocolate," Eskel muttered, which startled a spluttering laugh from Dandelion. "And I don't have anywhere to go. You've put out plenty of drinks." And having let himself finally be still, he wasn't altogether sure he could get back on his feet anytime soon, even without the impending drunkenness.

"Yes," Dandelion said. "Right. A private performance it is, then."

He stood and fetched one of the lutes from the table and fussed with it for a moment, tightening pegs, plucking individual strings. Without any other preamble, he drew a chord from it that raised the hair on the back of Eskel's neck, and another that made his eyes sting. Eskel took another hasty drink and put one hand over his eyes, but that was all he could do to hide, sitting right here beside Dandelion.

Still. They were alone, and Dandelion had been one of Geralt's truest friends, right to the end. He would understand, even if he did all his understanding in music and words instead of the way a witcher would, going around with a stone where his heart should be, drinking grimly at a brother's side. 

Dandelion began to sing, and the words washed over Eskel like a flood, like standing in a downpour or under a waterfall. Nothing could freeze this; nothing could hold it back. Even the silly flowery shit only made Eskel remember the truth of Geralt that much more vividly. The numb weight in his chest turned at last to a sharp, honest pain, like cleaning out a wound.

The loss--like a limb bitten off, like the earth disappearing from under his feet--was suddenly something Eskel couldn't ignore. Every bright-edged memory was a blade, another thing lost, another thing that only he was left to remember now. The music and the words and Dandelion's voice weaving the two together made everything Eskel felt somehow clearer and sharper, more _real_ , than he could ever feel it on his own. 

Tears were leaking from his eyes by the end of the first stanza, and he set down the bottle to cover his eyes with both hands. He didn't need the help of the liquor now. 

The ballad was only as far as Geralt deciding he couldn't stand aside from the slaughter when Eskel began to sob, curling down over his knees and letting the grief tear its way out of him, long overdue. His last surviving brother, his oldest friend, the one person he'd always been at home with no matter what roof was over their heads, if any--he was right there in every chord and every word, almost close enough to touch, whispering in Eskel's ear one last time. That was Geralt, brave and beautiful and foolish and fated and _gone_.

Dandelion kept singing steadily, only a little louder, so that even as Eskel wept the song could still reach him. Even now, with all he was finally beginning to understand he'd lost, the song meant he wasn't quite alone.


End file.
